Race Day Fueling and Hydration Strategy with Andy Blow

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. Andy Blow is a sports scientist and the founder of Precision Fuel and Hydration. Andy was formerly an elite level triathlete who can count a couple of top 10 Ironman finishes and and an Xterra age group world title to his name. It was during his racing career that he discovered how personalizing his own carb, electrolyte and fluid intake can make such a difference to performance. And this led him to setting up Precision fuel and hydration.com a company that specializes in helping athletes nail their fueling and hydration strategies for training and competing. And dad, we're really excited about this episode because it is just a topic that athletes really need specific help with. And Andy just does such a great job and his whole company Precision Hydration and you can go check everything out they're doing at precisionfuel and hydration.com they just do such a great job of explaining it to the age group athlete and any triathlete that needs it. And they work with a lot of pros to get their hydration and fueling right, which can have such an impact on race day.

Yeah, and we've had many fantastic guests on the program and all have been contributing to give our listeners some really good insight into how the body metabolizes the fueling. And it is the extra leg in a triathlon. It is the extra leg in a cycling race, in a marathon. If you don't have your fueling right, your fitness has no impact on the result. You can be the fittest person in the world if you don't fuel correctly for an endurance event. We're talking and we know we can get away with it from shorter events where you can actually have no fuel for under an hour or you know, some people are capable of doing it no fueling for two hours. But for an endurance event where we're talking, you know, three to nine to 10 hours, you. You cannot function without the fueling being spot on. And this is another intriguing interview with someone who has experienced the lows of poor nutrition to sabotage the outcome of their event. And someone who is at the pointy end of, who was at the pointy end of of elite triathlon and is so determined to not let it happen to himself that he spent all of his time researching and finding ways that you know simple ways to prevent this from derailing his performance. And he had instant success and has gone on from that point to, you know, spread the word that, you know, how easily it can be fixed if you are willing to trial and error and not be extreme, but try to be a balanced approach to it. And that's the thing I really enjoyed the most, was his balanced approach to solving a situation that most people are experiencing every time they compete in an endurance event.

Almost every triathlete out there who's competed in any endurance triathlons, whether it's Olympic, up to half Ironman or Ironman, have experienced either dehydration levels or cramping, a real big salt loss, or some sort of gut issues with either bonking without enough fuel or overeating and having real big gut issues and digestion. So we bring break it down in this episode exactly why that's happening and what you can do to fix it. And any question you've had about why that's happening is really covered here, which is really exciting. And Andy does a really great job of, like we said, breaking it down and explaining it to you. And that's what his whole company is for. So here is the episode with Andy Blow from Precision Hydration. Andy, thank you so much for joining us here on the podcast. We want to start with the first first question, and that is, what does fueling and hydration mean to you?

Fueling and hydration, for me is. Is the key to being able to race to your full potential in. In long events, it's that kind of. It's a bit of a cheesy thing to say, but for triathletes in a long race, it is the fourth discipline. And it's one that, for me, I know that when I was at my fittest and probably going back 15 or 20 years now, I was unable to always perform at my best, not because of a lack of conditioning, but because of getting fueling and hydration wrong. So that's where what I do now comes full circle, because it's all about trying to help athletes to. To nail their fueling and hydration so that they can execute their best race.

So you didn't have the luxury back then of having something like precision fuel and hydration, which is a lot now have access to, which can just give you an immediate solution. And we'll dive into that in this episode because I have personal experience right now of. Of this immediately helping me. But back when you realized that your fueling and hydration was the fourth discipline, that was majorly. Letting you down. How did you first go about solving that? And what kind of things did you use? Because like I said, you didn't have immediate perfectly balanced salt tablets to start taking in.

Yeah, I think I did probably what a lot of, what a lot of people do first time around when, when you do a big race and it goes horribly wrong, you go looking for answers, don't you? And you, you think there might be a magic bullet out there. And I think, I suppose what I did was each time things would go wrong, I would radically change a lot of things that I was doing. So I'd maybe consider that if I was. It would be. It could be anything from my wetsuit to my running shoes to the training I'd done to the drinks I was using. And I wasn't particularly analytical or organized around interrogating what, what was going wrong. And it was only when I was working with my. I was working with a coach and eventually I spoke to a friend of mine who was a medical doctor, and the kind of message that I got from both, well, from them in combination was my coaches saying, look, you are extremely fit at the moment. All of the indicators we've got, when you do small races, when you do training session, you have the conditioning to do way better. And the friend of mine who's a doctor, he looked at the, he was looking. What stimulated him to look into hydration specifically for me was he was seeing me finish long races covered in white salt stains and saying the symptoms that you're describing, cramping, feeling, really sick, performance fade. But it's not because you're running out of energy. It's just kind of like this, this nausea, lethargy and probably. So it's all very consistent with losing lots and lots of fluid and electrolytes. So we then started down this path of like interrogating that particular angle, having a sweat test, figuring out that I lose, we all knew that I lose a ton of sweat because I just am a sweaty person. I'm one of those people that sweats a lot. But then finding out that that sweat was very, very high in electrolytes, very high in sodium, that then put me on the right path. But what I've just described, yeah, is probably a three or four year journey of, you know, hitting and hoping a lot. And I think that one of the things we try and do with athletes now is encourage them to be way more analytical about their, their fluid and hydration, their fuel and hydration intake, recording it in training sessions, recording it in races too. So that. So that even though an element of trial and error still needs to go on, you're not just, you know, you're not just starting from a blank slate every time you're iterating your way to improvement.

Andy, can we just delve into that a little bit? Because, as you said right at the end there, it did take a long journey to get to that point where you were confident that it was going to actually not be a preventative fourth leg of your race. But what things did you go through to get to that point? Did you do massive changes? Did you do one at a time? After you've done your sweat test, you understood how much you were sweating, and then what products were you. Were you trying? Yeah, just. Just give us a little bit of a history of how that evolved to finally, you're getting nailing, you know, you finish the iron man, you go far out. I did it. I didn't cramp. I succeeded.

Yeah, it felt really good. I think. I think what it was. The first thing that I did, which was slightly erroneous, was I started to drink a lot more fluid volume, because I was aware that I was sweating a lot. And so I experimented with just drinking more. I assumed that the performance fair, a lot of the chat in sports science and performance, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s, was around dehydration being a real problem for athletes, and that it was about not drinking enough fluid. And so I definitely recall in some races where I would essentially just drink and drink and drink, and I was drinking a lot in the buildup as well, so I was probably even starting the races a little bit washed out from too much fluid. And that was. That was kind of the first iteration, the first big mistake that I made. But when I had the sweat test done and Dr. Jutley did a very simple calculation as to how much salt and how much sodium I might be losing throughout the course of a race, we talked about. Then we sort of looked back and said, well, basically you might be taking X amount of milligrams per hour in some of the sports nutrition products using. But. But you need, like, basically it was about three, four or five times that amount. And almost immediately, the biggest change I made was I started using salt tablets. You just classic. Just literally, you know, salt capsules. We worked out how many of those we thought I might need to take per hour, and it seemed like an excessive amount, but I kind of, at this point, I was in for trying anything. So I started doing that. And then. And in my case that was where it was a real, almost immediate game changer, because that was clearly, like, the missing ingredient for me. I was losing tons and tons of salt. I started to put quite a bit more in, and there it was, like night and day. You know, there were, as you say, I was. I was able to finish races all of a sudden without cramping. And I felt like I could pretty much execute a performance that was congruent with my level of fitness, as opposed to finishing an hour slower than I thought because I've had to walk second half of the marathon or something. And. And so that was the. That was the biggest. That was the biggest single change that made for me. And I probably went a bit far then immediately after that, in one direction, which was then. And this is what a lot of athletes do, is that worked for me. So then I began to preach this to other people. This is like the secret to success, when, of course, it isn't for everyone, because not everyone is the same. And so I think over the years, what. What we've learned is, is to try to educate people on this idea of individualization, the fact that there are people out there like me, that require quite an aggressive supplementation of fluid and sodium during races to keep going. But on the flip side, we see people who can. Who are right at the other end of the spectrum, who don't need as much, and they can actually, you know, if not harm themselves and certainly harm their performance by overly aggressive intake. And so it was that. That piece around individualization of sodium intake was the light bulb moment for me. And once we zeroed in on that, it was a relatively quick fix. You know, it kind of happened. It happened quite quickly.

Look, I'm intrigued. Was the. When you first started over hydrating.

Were.

You just taking water? We're taking water with some electrolytes. Were you taking water with some carbs in the initial stages when you made the mistake, were you just taking water? And how was that positive in a negative way with the main thing you were struggling with is you can't function when you have cramp. We all know we can't function to our best ability when we have cramps. So how did that go, and what were the experiences and what were your combinations you were trying early, before you got to the salt point?

Yeah, it was a lot of water that I was drinking. Um, I would. I would certainly, in the days before a race, try to load up on a lot of water. So you see athletes doing that even today, you see them walking around constantly with water. Bottles. I remember doing the World Long Distance Triathlon Championships in Nice in, I think it was around 2003. It was going to be very hot and I was, it was my first time representing Great Britain as an elite and even though I'd only kind of basically scraped onto the back end of the team, I was, it was, it meant a lot to me to have the opportunity to do that. And so days before I was drinking tons of water thinking it's going to be hot, I'm going to struggle in the heat. And I, and I reckon I even stood on the start line of that race, like mildly hyper natremic because I drunk so much fluid and it was within, I don't know, 40 or 50 miles on the bike that I was. My performance was just falling off a cliff. But what I did stupidly is kind of double down and drank more because I was so. This mindset that I think we've all been there, this, this is not enough fluid, you know, and, and I was peeing and feeling rubbish and I. The, the run was a death march, you know, almost from the start and I was embarrassingly slow and it was kind of a terrible experience basically and that was drinking a lot of water. I think the following year I did Kona and out there I was just trying to smash tons of Gatorade because it was all the aid stations. I assume that with some electrolytes in it that would be better. But again ended up with this. Like, I remember having a stomach like a watermelon on the, on the bike and whilst it was marginally better than in Nice because I actually managed to, I didn't, I didn't have a great race there. I think I, I think I got around in about ten and a half hours and honestly I was probably in shape to race closer to between 9 and 9:30 in an Ironman. It. Although I look back, I felt at the time like it was a complete disaster. I did keep moving and I actually got a bit quicker through the run because I think my body started to process everything I'd taken in on the bike and, and I finished relatively strongly, although in the days after that I was really quite ill again with hyponatremia type symptoms because I'd flushed out all of the, all of the electrolytes. So I remember flying from Kona to LA to get the connection back to the UK and actually sitting in LA airport and really not fancy and getting on the next flight at all. Like I sat in a, sat in a fast food restaurant just with my Head on the table and just thought, shit, like a pounding headache and all of what I now know to be symptoms of hyponatremia. So I think I was quite lucky that with those, with what I was doing to myself, that I didn't make myself more ill. Because we do know that athletes die from hyponatremia. You know, they consume water or dilute sports drinks and in, in fortunately relatively rare cases, people can actually do themselves enough of a brain injury to die from that.

Yeah.

Can you explain in detail what hyponatremia actually is? Because I feel like every single athlete needs to know what it is and not everyone does. And it is much more common than we think. So what happens and why is it bad?

Yeah, so normally your blood contains a level of sodium that is tightly regulated. It's regulated by homeostasis. And it needs to sit between about 135 and 100, 145 millimoles per liter of blood, which equates to about 3,600 milligrams of sodium in every liter of your blood. In other words, that your blood is really quite salty. It's why if you cut your lip and taste it, it will taste of salt, because there's a lot of salt in there. If that level goes gets too high or too low. If it gets too high, it makes you very thirsty. So that's why if you consume salt, you then feel the need to consume water to dilute the levels back down. If you, if on the flip side, you sweat and you lose. And that's why if you sweat and you lose a lot of water, your. Your relative concentration of sodium in the blood rises and it stimulates thirst to balance things out. Now the problem with hyponatremia is if you over drink water or anything, which is a very low sodium content. If your kidneys can't pee out fast enough, as is the case when you're exercising, you can dilute the sodium levels in the blood quite significantly. And the body has do something to maintain the balance. And what it does is it pushes fluid from the extracellular space from your vascular system into the body's cells. It kind of squirrels it away in the cells to balance things out. And this causes the swells to the cells to swell up. So if people have got hyponatremia often you, they will present with like puffy ankles and fingers and general kind of, they will look a bit blown up because they are waterlogged. And then the danger is if that happens to your brain cells because it's the body doesn't discriminate brilliantly. Where this fluid goes, it can be absorbed into any body tissues. If it is absorbed into the brain, the brain swells. And of course the brain is encased in the skull and has nowhere to expand to and nowhere to go. So you get cognitive disturbance. The brain can actually get severely damaged and you can do, you can do neurological damage by it pressing against the skull and the pressure in the, in the cranium being too high. So that's what makes it so dangerous and why people often with hyponatremia suffer kind of cognitive dysfunction. Lack of coordination, that, that kind of thing. And feel a bit, they, they almost kind of get spaced out and don't know where they are. They get confused. It's a really weird, weird thing and it needs correcting pretty quickly, you know, which either happens by the body getting rid of fluid or if you're treated medically, they'll put a very strong salt solution back into your system which reverses the action, pulls fluid back from the cells.

It's scary, isn't it? Because it's, you know, when you're cramping, you would do anything to stop it. Especially if you're in an ironman and you're just walking because you can't run, you would, you would just do anything to get out yourself out of that situation and you'd think that drinking more water is going to help and in fact doing yourself damage, which is a really scary thing to have happen. Can you now talk to us about. And this is a really fundamental concept that. I love how you talk about this and a lot of your articles touch on this and it's this, this concept of the three lever system. And when you're thinking about hydration and fueling, you can really break it down to just three simple things that you need to be aware of and that's going to help your performance on race day.

Yeah, we call this the three levers, which is like a quote that came up in a webinar we did once that really seemed to resonate with people. It was kind of, I think the question that was asked is if you have to boil it down, you know, what, what are the major nutrients or inputs that the body needs when you're doing endurance exercise? And if you do really distill that to the basics, you need water to replace what you're losing in sweat. And alongside that, to lesser or greater extent, you're going to need sodium because that's the main electrolyte you lose in Your sweat. And then the only other thing you really need is acutely to support endurance performance is energy. And usually that's in the form of carbohydrates because you're, if you're going at anything like the intensity most people are going at in a half ironman or a full ironman or anything shorter than that, your reliance on fat burning is very, very small. And you're predominantly going to be burning glycogen and carbohydrate. And we all know you've only got a couple of hours worth of carbohydrates stored in the body. So basically when you're exercising hard and sweating, you need water, you need salt, and you need carbs. And that's what we call the three levers. Because as, as an athlete, your job is to kind of understand those. Pull on each lever appropriately based on the pace that you go in, your fitness level, the conditions you're racing in. And by taking those three inputs correctly, you keep the body as close to balance as you can. You help it maintain homeostasis, which then allows you to race as hard as you can. When one of those things gets seriously out of whack. You know, if you're low on fluid, you will become dehydrated at some point. If you're low on carbs, you, you, you will suffer. You're hitting the wall or bonking. If you, if you are low on sodium, you will, you could suffer from hyponatremia or potentially cramping or something like that. And so, and, and the same can be not the same. But, but problems happen when you overdo those three things as well. You know, you overdo water, that's a big hyponatremia risk. You overdo carbohydrate and it's overwhelms the gut and you get sickness and bloating and GI issues. So the ability to pull on those three levers accurately is your job as an athlete during a race. And that requires a lot of understanding and trial and error to get it right.

Is there a point in terms of intensity and duration where one of the three becomes more important than the other?

I would say it depends a lot on the weather conditions because in a lot of circumstances you can make a strong argument for the fact that energy intake is the most important thing for long races. You know, the biggest sort of short term risk is running out of energy. Having said that, it can be flipped on its head in hot and humid conditions because fluid and you could become dehydrated before you run. Out of energy. So it's really hard to. You can create different cases and then you can probably prioritize. But in general, there's always going to be no. In a. In a long, cold race, carbohydrate intake is going to be far more important than it is in a long, hot race where arguably fluid and sodium intake will be more important because you're trying to thermoregulate and sweat. So it. And layered on top of that, there's all these different physiological variables. So some people will burn carbs at a faster rate than others, some will be able to absorb more carbs than others, Some people will sweat more than others, Some people lose more sodium than others. So that's where you need to understand your physiology, the demands of the race. And then based on that, plus a little bit of past experience, you can kind of come to what we would describe then as like guardrails for each of those numbers. So for me, I know that compared with the average person, my guardrails for fluid and sodium are relatively high, but my, my carbohydrates is relatively normal. We work with some athletes who, if we talk about carbohydrate for a minute, they, they seem to be able to survive and thrive on 100 to 120 grams of carbohydrate an hour. You know, like, I've. I've rarely tried that. And honest, honestly, I mean, I don't race as long and as hard as I used to, but that feels like that would be a lot for me. You know, I'm more of a 60 to 90 grams kind of guy if, if I'm going. Well, but you figure those things out by. Yeah, understanding where the numbers kind of should be or theoretically should be, but then actually testing them in the real.

World.

And taking notes and figuring it out. And as I said before, iterating your way to a program that works for.

You, there would be, as you just said, a vast difference between an elite performer and a lot of our listeners who are the everyday triathlete who. One of their main goals is just to complete the event if it's an Ironman, or maybe improve on their previous best. So, you know, they're. They're controlling their intensity to a level where they can sustain the output for the entire event. And we are big professors of, you know, getting people to run the whole marathon in an Ironman. And, and therefore your requirements based around your intensity could be vastly different from an elite person who's riding at 80 to 85% of their FTP. Compared to someone who's riding at 60%. Can you just talk about that?

Definitely. That's an example of where it's interesting to understand what elite athletes do always if you're a aspiring amateur, but it's not always directly translatable. What applies exactly, as you've said, Jared, to what you're doing at 85, 90% of your FTP is different to if you're riding at 60% because you've got kind of an advantage in riding at a lower percentage of your FTP and that you're putting the body under less strain. You can probably eat, for example, more solid food. You might even and introduce more of a mixture of macronutrients. You might have a bit more fat and that sort of thing in, in products that you're eating because you've got the capacity to digest them because you're not working the body as hard and the intensity is that little bit lower. At the very pointy end when people are going flat out, we see them in most cases almost exclusively using very, very simple carbohydrates and lots and lots of them because they are burning through them so fast. They need to be highly efficient at utilizing a large amount of carbs and especially in the heat. What's very interesting with elite athletes that often it is a race against a race of how much can you get in without A making yourself sick and B, how much can you absorb in order to support that level of performance rather than the other way around. Whereas. So we do see elite athletes over consume from time to time, but that's kind of relative to what they can absorb as opposed to relative to what they're burning. Whereas if you're going slower, you definitely don't necessarily want to be copying the numbers of someone who's going significantly faster. And it's where a little bit of adjustment is required. The problem these days being a lot of the time we're now reading about, okay, well we used to be recommended 60 grams of carbohydrate an hour as kind of an optimal level of consumption. That's what lab based data said we could do. But then we analyzed athletes in the field and they're doing 90 or 100 grams. And now we're getting constant reports of people doing 120, 130 grams an hour. And whilst all of that is more than theoretically possible, it doesn't mean it applies to everyone. And finding your own level with it is actually what you should worry about as an individual.

Could that just be a case of elite athletes are getting faster and faster and so their ability to hold a high percentage of their FTP is getting greater with their ability. So therefore their earning more energy because they're working relatively harder.

I think there's a, there's a little bit of that. Although I would, I would also argue that if you, and I don't know if there were any. I haven't really seen much data on what the Mark Allens and Dave Scotts and people like that were doing back in the day. Because you've got to remember these guys, 20 odd, maybe even 30 years ago, were still going like low eights in Kona for the race. So although, yes, we're now going 750s or whatever, it's. The relative difference is quite small. They were, they were extremely fit and on the ragged edge and were probably eating and drinking a lot to support that performance. But there just wasn't the industry around it in terms of doing the analysis on that. I think now there are a lot, there are a lot more products out there. A lot more people are invested in understanding the finer points of what elite athletes take. So there's a lot more, there's a lot more interest in it. One thing that did happen is I would say in recent years we certainly saw a big move towards kind of like fat adaptation, A, a potential way of doing things. And that appears to have kind of, kind of be on the back foot again now with more athletes being more concerned with maximizing carbohydrate intake as opposed to trying to adapt to fat burn. Because although there have been a few success stories anecdotally, the, the evidence still doesn't really point towards the fact that high levels of performance can be supported with, with fat predominantly rather than carbs.

Yeah, that's a, it's a rabbit hole in itself. I want to take it back to the three levers because again, I just think it's a brilliant concept and I know that anyone listening will be going, okay, well if I just have to figure out my carb intake, my salt intake and my fluid intake, where do I start? So one of the most surprising things I found when understanding everything you're doing at precision hydration is what you said earlier, and that's the level of variance among individuals in terms of their fluid loss and then their potential sodium loss inside that fluid. So can you talk us through some of the numbers and what you're really looking at in terms of this, this wide range of potential loss in those two main factors of hydration?

Yeah, so when it comes to Fluid loss. The. If I start with the lower end of it, because that's simple. There are cases where if you're doing relatively short endurance events, let's say we're talking about like, you know, an hour or two, if conditions are really quite mild or moderate or even cold, and if you're someone with a low sweat rate, if you turn up on the start line well hydrated, there is ample evidence to suggest that people can not only get away with, but probably perform really, really well, even optimally on basically zero hydration intake. You know, it's, it's definitely not the case. We see these days, I go to my local park run, which is 5K, you know, down, and it's not hot here at the moment. And you will see people starting a park run, 5k carrying a water bottle. And I'm not necessarily, not necessarily, you know, making fun of them for doing that. They, they don't necessarily understand, you know, or they may feel like they need a drink. And for some people, running a 5k is like a serious undertaking if they're not. If they're just starting their fitness journey. But at the same time, we definitely know that like a human can run 5k if you. Without a drink and 10k and so on. And I used to do, and I wouldn't recommend it, but I've definitely done multiple Olympic district triathlons with nil by mouth. That was not uncommon. It certainly probably wasn't uncommon when you were racing, Gerald, I would imagine, but it was definitely the case when I was doing it, that you might have a bottle of something on the bike and you might grab a cup of something on the run if you really felt like you needed it, but you weren't. It wasn't a big discussion point about eating and drinking during those races. And so I think with endurance stuff, there's an interesting tipping point where at some point, certainly in shorter races and in cooler conditions and even in probably moderate distance races, say let's say up to half ironman in cool conditions, if you listen to your body, if you're experienced and listen to your body, you can probably drink what you feel like drinking. The phrase that gets thrown around is to thirst, you know, drink to thirst. And actually, if you know your body and you've done a bit of racing and you're confident, then drinking to thirst in those kind of events is, is totally, totally fine. And that could be relatively small amounts of fluid. If you then go to the, like the other extreme. And if we're talking about triathlon, there Are triathlons longer than Ironman? But they're, they're pretty niche, you know, if we talk about Iron man as being the longest sort of proper race, if you like, then at that extreme end, if you're someone in hot and humid conditions who has a very high sweat rate, we've seen people consume well in excess of 1.2 liters an hour for the entire, you know, averaged out over the entire race in order to support their performance. There was actually in our case study database on our website, which you guys might have seen, there's a guy, Luke Henderson, who's an Aussie age group athlete who's like in the often, you know, kind of up there in the top few in his age category. He has an insanely high sweat rate and insanely high sodium loss and took something like, I think, I think it was about 1.3 liters an hour in Ironman, Western Australia last year. And previously he'd always ended up in the medical tent with complications around dehydration from having not consumed that much. So on the extreme end, you could be requiring tons of fluid just to get yourself around a long event. And so that, that basically kind of brackets the, the outer limits on fluid volume. And then there's a sliding scale in between where the environmental conditions, the duration and your physiology dictate how close you are to that higher limit. Which is where you know, these kind of rule of thumbs that you sometimes hear like one bottle an hour, which could, which is a bit ambiguous because is it a 500ml bottle or a 750ml bottle, but something about you know, 500, 750, 800ml an hour. That's, they're the kind of figures that we start to get to with how much the average person, if they exist, might need in a longer and hotter race. And it's a case of then I suppose the, the first place to start. You can measure your sweat rate in training by weighing yourself before and after training sessions. But if you, if you've not done that or if you, you know, if you don't want to go into that level of detail, even just thinking about are you in general a sweatier person working in hotter conditions, or are you a less sweaty person and you're working in more mild conditions, that can start to nudge you in which direction your level of fluid intake might go. I think even one step back from that, though, for a lot of people, even just having an appreciation for how much you normally drink during a race, or whatever. A lot of people, we ask them, they have no idea because they just kind of go at it on the day and don't keep any mental records or anything like that. So a good place to start is figuring out what you're currently doing at the moment. Because if you're finishing races and doing okay, then you're probably not doing something too bad. There may be room for improvement, but use that as a starting point as to whether you need to adjust upwards or downwards. And with regards to sodium, that has two factors that go along with that. One. One is obviously your individual rate of loss. Like, are you a salty sweater like I am? Or are you someone who's less salty or more average or lower? That that will have an immediate impact on whether you're likely to benefit from more or less aggressive sodium intake. And then alongside that is this factor of like, how much fluid in total do you need? Because if I'm racing a short race and it's cool, if I'm not taking in a lot of fluid, I also don't particularly need a lot of sodium because that the net turnover of both is low and I can get away with very little. I raced for two and a half hours on this Saturday, just gone. It was relatively cool conditions. It was a swim run, so I was in and out the ocean. The Ocean was like 12 Celsius, so it really was quite cold. You're not doing a lot of sweat. Yeah. And. And I took basically 0 sodium for 2 1/2 hours. Flip that on its head, though. And if I did something in the heat, I would be taking 5, 600 milligrams an hour for that because I know I'd be sweating a lot. And. And then on the flip side, you know, when, when you've got someone who is very salty, you're. You're sweating a lot and you're drinking a ton of fluid. You need to be cognizant of what that sort of ratio of fluid to sodium is that you're taking in. Which is why we. We report it in the case studies that we do on the website, because some people need a high level of fluid along with a high level of sodium, and other people just really need a high level of fluid if they're not as salty. And it's kind of keeping those things in balance. We've seen cases where individuals. We had a very prominent pro athlete come to us, either last year or the year before, who'd had a sweat test and figured out that they were very salty and immediately turned up the dial on the salt to max that they were taking in races, but found that this was not helping and it was actually making things worse. But they hadn't really increased the volume of fluid they were taking with it. And we ended up pulling their numbers back down again to something a little bit more reasonable because more is not always better when it comes to hydration, as we've always discussed. So it's kind of keeping those two things in parallel. But to answer your question about, you know, sodium levels, zero is an acceptable level of sodium for some people to intake some of the time in, in endurance races. And we've seen people needing, you know, 1500 milligrams, maybe even a little bit more per hour in some longer and hotter races if their physiology dictates. So there's a much wider difference in sodium intakes than there are in fluid intakes, if that makes sense.

One of the intriguing things and what you've just said is a fantastic summary of what the possibilities are. But when we prepare for an event, we want to go in with confidence. And if you're only learning by racing, how did that performance go? It can be quite frustrating, can't it? And you've experienced this yourself. How important do you place on training at the race intensity and practicing your hydration sodium levels as.

I think it's absolutely critical and it's again, if I could go back and talk to my younger self, that's what I would tell myself to do, is to do more race simulation training sessions. I think if you're a triathlete, it's a lot of the time it's largely probably overkill and unnecessary to try and do sort of swim, bike run, but certainly doing big bike run sessions where you, where you try to simulate the race conditions as best you can, you try to use the kind of products and the kind of quantities of fluid, sodium and carbs that you intend to use in races is an absolute no brainer. You know, when I, when I think back to the best races that I did have, I was practicing on the race course regularly. I was using my race bike, my race wheels, I was doing a brick run in my race running shoes off the bike. I was practicing everything, but I was probably still eating bananas and drinking water when on race day I was going to use a sports drink and gels, you know, because back then it was, and I think some people still have that mentality, it's like, oh, I'll save the sports nutrition, I'll save the gels for race day. And I would Never be one to stand there and say, you know, you should use energy gels in every single training session. You don't, you just don't need them. But for those key sessions in the build up, you want to simulate as much as you possibly can. So there's no surprises on race day. And I think that is where you can shortcut the trial and error process and the learning process massively.

It's absolutely, it's profound and so eye opening just to hear it explained so well and so clearly and it makes so much sense when you hear it like this. And you, and you see all these real world examples like you said, the case studies on your website and I encourage people to go check them out because it's really cool to see you actually give a breakdown of professional athletes and professional races and they, they give you access to exactly what they did, which is just so cool to see now to understand it really clearly. You said that you can, you can get your fluid loss by simply weighing yourself before and after. So what is that process? And then afterwards we'll get into how you measure your sweat and your potential carbs.

Yeah, well the, the, the useful thing about sweat is that it's, it's mainly water and water weighs, you know, one liter of water weighs one kilo. So the maths on this is really simple. If you weigh yourself before a training session and then weigh yourself again afterwards. If you didn't drink anything, it's super easy. And if you did drink something, you just need to correct for the amount that you've ingested, then you get a really good idea of what your sweat rate is. So essentially you go out on the bike for two hours, you lose 2kg. If you didn't drink anything, you have a sweat rate there of roughly one literally per hour because you've lost two kilos over over two hours. And it's, it is a bit crude and there are criticisms you can make of it. But if you do that regularly enough in, in conditions and intensities, wearing the kind of clothing that you intend to race in, then you do build up a picture of what your sweat losses are like. And on our website in the knowledge hub area, we can give you a direct link for this. There's a blog which explains the process in a walks you through it. It even contains a link to a downloadable spreadsheet where you can just put your data in for various training sessions. You can put the wattage, you can put the weather conditions.

That was easy.

Yeah. It work out your sweat rate for you and then you can then look at some reference values and say, okay, well, this seems like this puts me in the higher category or the lower category and gives you a sense of what your sweat loss might be like. And that, that sort of idea is, comes up for a lot of criticism from people because of this idea that you should do it once, then you know your sweat rate and then you know exactly how much to drink, which is total rubbish. But it's, it's one of those things where it's, it's a process that you go through many, many times to get a sense of what your body's losing. You can then experiment with different ratios of replacement and then based off of that, you can take notes on your performance and start to figure out, okay, well, if I replace about 70% of my losses, for example, that seems to work for me. And that gives you a good steer on race day as to what those guardrails should be around. Fluid loss. And this is particular, I would say this is particularly useful for anyone who's on the higher end of loss, anyone who feels like they do lose a lot of sweat because it does give you a bit of confidence in maybe drinking some bigger numbers in the fact that you may, then you can avoid over drinking. Because one of the dangers is that obviously people feel like, oh, I've got a high sweat rate, but am I going to be then over drinking? Well, as long as you're losing a little bit of weight during a session, even if you're drinking quite a lot, that's a pretty good indicator that you're not going above 100% of your losses, which is something to avoid.

Are you a believer in overcompensating or under compensating? From all of the experiences and the data that you've, that you've collected, just give us a little glimpse of what your gut feeling is. Not intentional pun there, but how do you see it? Would you rather someone be more conservative or go over the top?

It's a really good question and it's a really difficult one to answer with a simple answer. So I think I would say. And you always have to be careful because if you say to athletes anything to do with anything which implies that more is better. You know, I'm an athlete myself. You, I know that the way the nervous brain works is that if I say you should go closer to the upper limit, then multiple people go over it. I'm not going to name names because it would be unfair and, you know, I don't want to do it. But we've just worked with a professional athlete who raced at Ironman St. George who had a pretty shocking race, who came to us afterwards and said, look, this is what I ate and drank and like something's gone wrong. And it just wasn't a great day out. So can you have a look at it now? This person took in excess of 170 grams of carbohydrate an hour on the bike, which is like a number which I've never heard of before, you know, and all of the symptoms, all of the issues that they had were congruent with just someone who'd over consumed and they had a load of fluid, a load of sodium, they'd, they just pulled every lever to, to 11, you know, and gone for it. And, and when we had a chat with them, it was like, well, yeah, I did a race last year where I was aggressive with my fluid and carbohydrate consumption, won the race, did really well, it felt like the right thing to do. Plus the world championships, it was going to be even higher intensity. No. So we can see that tendency that athletes, if given the inference that more is better, will go hard with it. And so to kind of try and answer your question a bit more directly, Jared, I would say in general, the longer the races and the hotter the race is, the more keen I am for people to be relatively aggressive with their intake. But the word there is relatively and not just doing more. If you said to me, do you see more people over or under doing it? I think left to their own devices, people probably fuel and potentially hydrate a little bit conservatively. In long races, we probably spend more time encouraging people to tweak that, especially their carbohydrate intake, up a little bit in the early stages because you don't feel like eating in the early stages because you feel great, you tapered, you rested, you carb loaded, you genuinely don't feel like you need to consume in that first hour on the bike, but actually to set yourself up for a good run, you probably do. So in general, we'd find ourselves encouraging people to do a little bit more and push the upper limits. That being said, if you're someone who's had a history of GI issues, or if you know that your numbers are already pretty high and you're looking for ways to improve your performance, there are instances and athletes and cases where we see people skimming through on relatively light intakes and if that works for them, ultimately performance is your guide. We've been working recently an amazing guy called Adam Holland, who's in the uk, he's not a triathlete, he's a runner. And he just ran 10 marathons in 10 days in an event. So there was a race, organized race every day with a mass start race on the final day for thousands or hundreds of participants. And he ran every single one in under three hours. I think it's a new world record. He was down as low as 245 on a lot of the days. And you would look at that and think the fueling and hydration he would need to take in for that ought to be off the charts. But his intake is really, really quite small. And there's something to do with his level of training, his physiology, his experience. He does it. He's a very non data driven guy. He runs very much on feel and experience. He's been doing multi day marathons and ultras and marathons for years and years and years. I think he has a Guinness World record for the youngest person to ever run 100 marathons when he was in his early 20s. And so he kind of throws the rule book completely out the window because if we wrote him a plan it would look nothing like what he did. But I would also wager that a lot of people who would try to do what he did wouldn't manage it on the level of calories and fluids he's taken in. So there's. You have to figure out whether you're someone who is. Where are you currently? Are you more likely to benefit from more rather than less and then adjust it accordingly.

That's a great answer. There'd be a certain amount of adaptation occurring too as you become an experienced athlete. Whether you're a beginner or someone who's been doing it a long time. There's got to be some adaptation that your body can. It learns so quickly, doesn't it? It's an amazing specimen, the human body, because it will adapt to change very quickly. And if you're a sedentary person, you'll adapt to being sedentary. If you all of a sudden change your habits and want to be physically active, your body will quickly do that without much challenge to it. So we are good at that. So that's probably going to be a factor in his, the example you were giving for the marathon runner, his ability to perform like that. And it's not something we would recommend people, you know, the everyday athlete try. But, but the, the answer you gave for the first question I asked was, you know, what should you be doing over or under so if you happen to make a mistake, this is the next question from that in an ironman and you have under fueled or you have over fueled and you want to rectify it, what is easier to come back from under fuelled athlete or an over fueled athlete?

Probably a little bit easier to come back from a little bit of over fueling. As long as you've not gone too far. Because if you just slow the pace a little bit, sometimes you can even be. You wouldn't want to deliberately make yourself sick, but sometimes people are sick and then that effectively clears out their stomach. Because usually if you've overdone it, the problem is that you feel lousy because you've got a bloated, horrid stomach and gut and you either need to go to the toilet or you need to feel like you need to be sick. And that's just the digestion problem. And if you slow the pace a little bit, take nil by mouth or only maybe a little bit of water for a while, you can give your body a chance to process, then you can come back pretty strong. I certainly, that's what I'm almost certain that's what happened to me when I did Kona is that I drank so much Gatorade on the bike that hydration and energy wasn't actually a big problem. But I felt horribly bloated. I started to run, I really didn't feel, and I just didn't eat and drink a lot. And as I got going, my body started to process all of that and actually I ran pretty strong in the end, you know, and so I think if you've overdone it a little bit, then you can just back off for a while. If you've significantly underdone it and really fallen off a cliff when it comes to either dehydration or glycogen depletion, it's a very tough road back. You know, we've all, we all probably know that feeling very well. When you run out of enough energy, when you have a blood sugar low now you can reach for a few cups of coke and you can, but that's going to take 15 minutes to get into your system. And then you're constantly on the fight to keep putting sugar in to keep yourself going because you've, you've tapped out your muscle glycogen stores to a very low level. And that, that can sometimes be irreversible. You know, you often see once the, once athletes start walking on the, on the run, when they've run out of energy it's, it's a death march then, really, you know, you're, you're eating and drinking, but you're not, you're not going to be picking it up again. The one thing I would say, though, I was just. Sorry, I was just gonna say the one thing I've learned with lots of long endurance races over the years, though, is if you can. The main thing is like, never give up hope because amazing things happen in long races. You can definitely. You can have some really low patches and feel really awful and come back. I was chatting with Leon chevalier, who came sixth at the Ironman St. George, and he's an athlete we've worked closely with for a number of years. His case study from that race is on the website. And he had a really low patch on the bike. Like, really didn't feel good, felt hungry, didn't feel good. He took on a lot of extra carbs and some caffeine and kind of sat back, but he kept his head down. He's a very mentally strong athlete and he kept tapping away. And from the outside he's got one of those poker faces. You would not have known the guy was struggling, but he was struggling. And then he came back and ran like a 243 or something like that. Top 10 in the world at his first attempts at the. And, and really held it together strongly. And I think you've just got to, you've got to be disciplined and like, maintain a positive outlook and keep plugging away because, you know, miraculous things can happen if you, if you, if you keep your mind in the game.

Yeah, it's such a, exactly correct. If you, if you, you never know what's going to happen next and, you know, you just got to keep, keep the mental toughness going and things can turn around good and bad. And I remember reading one of the races that Lionel Sanders competed in and he dropped his nutrition bottle and I can't remember, it was a 70.3. George, you might be able to help me. But he lost his nutrition, bounced out of his body off his bike and he, he really did a good job in. He actually slowed down on the bike to conserve more, more energy to stop burning the fuels as quick he took that decision and then when he got to the next aid station, he, you know, grabbed as much as he possibly could and he ended up actually running the whole field down bar one. And it was a really good example of when things are going wrong through a mistake. You can get it back if you think your way through, not only your Intensity that you're competing at. But I've lost my nutrition. I was meant to have this amount per hour. I've lost that. Now what can I do to get it back when I get to the next aid station? And I think what the things you're talking about, these are things that you only get to practice on race day if you've done it in training so that you know exactly how to rectify the situation.

I think he completely agree with that. We had exactly the same scenario with Leon in Iron Man Majorca last year. So he lost one of his concentrated bottles of nutrition right out of T1, bounced out of the bottle cage. He made a tactical decision that it was not. He was not going to. Would stop and pick it up. He immediately did the maths in his head what was in that bottle, picked up the requisite amount of gels from the next few aid stations and whatever other bottles of water he needed and basically did a very good job on hitting the same numbers with the course. But he could only do that because he had the presence of mind. He knew what he had. He knew what he'd lost, he knew what he needed to make up. He knew how many grams of carb were in the gels on the course because he'd done his homework work, you know, and. And then it becomes a process of just, yeah, you know, correct. Correcting it on the move. He went on and won that race, you know, and. But you do find there are athletes who are their coaches mix their bottle up for them or their partners mix their bottle up for them and told them, you need to finish this by the end of the bite. They have no idea really how much is in it. You know, you've got to, I think as the athlete, you've got to take ownership for knowing those numbers and then having a bit of a plan B. We even talk to athletes now based on those experiences of saying, okay, well, if you lost that bottle, what would you do? What's on course? Where are the aid stations so that you can at least. I remember doing that as an athlete with, you know, things like, if I had a puncture here, what would I do? Have I got, you know, the spares on my bike? Have I practiced how to do. You just got to mentally rehearse so that if these things happen, you can click into the. The mode of problem solving immediately instead of panicking or feeling sorry for yourself.

That's why when you set the fourth discipline, I couldn't agree more. And Dad, I know you'll love hearing that because it's the exact questions you ask athletes all the time. It's, it's, do you actually know your, your power numbers on the bike? Do you know your run numbers that you're supposed to go to? And now with this fourth discipline, it's, it's, do you know your hydration levels, you know, your carb levels that you're supposed to be taking in? And I'm sure that's music to your ears, dad, with, you know, empowering the athlete is, is one of your key mottos.

Absolutely, yeah. And I suppose it leads on to a few other little questions that I've got. We're kind of running short of time. We won't hold you up much more. But the impact of caffeine and we know that every athlete responds differently. Can you just give us a general overview for the people listening out there, what caffeine does and how effective or ineffective or how detrimental and how advantageous.

There are some general guidelines on how caffeine affects athletes, but they're like anything, individual variance is key. I think the data and kind of practical experience from us leans towards the fact that about probably about 70% of athletes or thereabouts benefit from using caffeine and there's maybe a significant minority that perhaps should avoid it. And I think a key indicator of whether you're likely to be in the former or the latter group is basically how you get on with it day to day. Because caffeine is consumed by so many adults around the world. I think it's. Over 90% of adults basically consume caffeine around the world. And you know, we all, we all tend to learn by trial and error how many coffees a day you can hack. You know, especially if you work in an office like ours where we've got a coffee machine right there. I'm always maze that some of the lads can go back at 2 and 3 and 4 in the afternoon for another coffee when I have a hard line of like 2, possibly 3 in the morning. But by about 11am I'm stopping because it will affect me more negatively later in the day. So a great thing to think about first of all is just like, are you a big caffeine user in day to day life? Because if you are, that's a great indication that you're probably someone who would benefit more strongly from using it in races. But the way caffeine works is it obviously affects the brain and the central nervous system. So it's a stimulant. It can cause you to feel more Alert, more focused. And it can potentially mask feelings of fatigue that happen in endurance, which is why it's so effective for endurance performance. And the dosage recommendations for athletes during competition and immediately before competition are usually about 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. So they're done in relation to body size because bigger people can often metabolize caffeine more quickly and effectively than smaller people for obvious reasons. So what that, what that tends to look like is, you know, let's, let's use me as an example. I weigh about 70 kilos, about sort of just over 11 stone. And I tend to, if I take caffeine in races, it will be dripping in like doses of 100 milligrams a couple of times during a race. Having pre caffeinated before the race with, with, you know, usually for me that's as simple as a strong coffee with my breakfast and maybe a caffeine gel immediately before the start. So that it's because caffeine takes about 15 minutes to get from your digestion. When you take a caffeine gel, for example, it will take about 15 minutes for that caffeine to start to get into the bloodstream and it will take about 45 to 60 minutes for the levels of caffeine to peak in the bloodstream. And then, and then caffeine sort of, the effects of it then decay for many hours. And I think the average half life is about, about four or five hours, which means that after four or five hours it will be 50% gone. And so during a half Ironman you're probably going to caffeinate before the start and then have a little top up dose at the end of the bike maybe. And in an Ironman you might have a couple of dose on the bike and one early or mid in the run. And I think a common mistake with caffeine is people don't realize how long it takes to become fully effective and how long it lasts for, for, because a lot of people say, they might say I'll have a caffeine gel at 20 miles, you know, in the marathon to give me a boost for the end. But that's going to hit you almost when you're crossing the line, which is a good time. If your performance in the after party is, you know, struggling then later on is.

You'Ve got to.

But yeah, I think got to have.

A good day somewhere, don't you?

And certainly we're, we're bringing out a caffeine gel ourselves very, very shortly. So we've been doing a lot of testing and a lot of, a lot playing around with it. And we've seen in our case studies again that a lot of athletes do use caffeine. The vast majority actually seem to use caffeine. And it's really about that sort of. You've got the two variables you've got to play with the dosage and timing and remembering that it behaves a bit more like say something like alcohol does in the body rather than carbohydrates. So you ingest it. It takes a while to, to become fully noticeable in the bloodstream and then takes a long time for it to decay away as opposed to carbohydrate which can be in absorbed and burned very quickly. So you have to put it in far more frequently if that makes sense.

Fantastic. I know myself, I don't drink coffee and never have my whole life. It's just something I've never done. I have had caffeine gels where I have no concrete evidence but it brings on cramp for me. It may not be the reason, but it's just coincidence that every time I do have a caffeine gel that I end up.

It's not, it's an interesting one. It's not something I've ever, not something I've ever heard of before and certainly not done any reading around it. I mean it does affect the nervous system. We know that caffeine does that. So if you're not habituated to using caffeine, which you won't be if you're not taking it every day, then I would imagine there could be some negative knock on side effects of using it in races. So that's something though which you know, honestly I've not, I've not come across it before but it's something which I will do a bit of digging on because I'd like to know the answer to that question. That's quite an interesting.

And on from that. How does it affect the balance of your sodium and is there something you need to actually, you know, we talked about practicing in training the intensity and the amount of sodium and hydration you take. You should be practicing the caffeine ingestion as well. So is there an imbalance happening the minute you take caffeine ingest?

How many direct impacts impact on that? Because it's, it's absorbed and acts on completely different pathways in the body. I mean theoretically caffeine is a diuretic and that can cause you to pee more. But a lot of the evidence suggests that during races and during exercise that if, because you, because you produce hormones that stop you peeing as much, that doesn't really play into it. I think the biggest rationale for using it alongside everything else in training, if you're going to use it in races, is, is as simple as saying it's part of that full practice. It's kind of using everything. And that I guess leads on to another interesting point around caffeine, around this idea of whether you should abstain from it in the build up to a race or not or abstain from it in training. So you feel the effects more in a race. And I think the jury's out on that one. To the extent that you definitely do feel more of a boost from caffeine if you, if psychologically especially if you abstain for it for a while. But if you are a habitual coffee drinker and you abstain in the week leading up to a race, that can play happen with your sleep. It can make you feel, it can make you feel quite, you know, with, well, it's. Without putting too fine a point at you. And that is not a good thing going into a competition. I used to do it, I used to drink decaf in the week leading up to a race and like hate my life for five days. And it's not good mentality, is it? So would I say, you know, maybe it makes sense to moderate your caffeine intake in the build up. I certainly found that the day before and stuff. I don't tend to if I'm, if it's a big race, if I'm nervous, then adding more caffeine into the mix doesn't help the old anxiety levels and the feelings of nerves before the race. So I'd probably naturally dial it down. But I don't think my, our general recommendation isn't for people to abstain and it is certainly to while it in, in your simulation training sessions so that you, you get a sense for how it, how it works in your body when you're racing.

So with your caffeine gel, what do you, what's your aim with that? Is there anything you're trying to do differently or just trying to get the dosage really accurate for athletes and easy for them to understand?

Yeah, like with the, the rest of our products we just tried to do two things really. It's like keep it extremely clearly labeled. So it's the same as our PF30 energy gel which has 30 grams of carbohydrate in it. It's got 100 milligrams of caffeine in it because we, we felt that that's a rel. That's up at the higher end of caffeine dose that you'll find in an energy gel. But we felt that we would rather encourage people to use less caffeine gels more infrequently and give people the option to keep it simple like that, rather than putting say 25 or 50 milligrams in. And then people have got to take multiple caffeinated products throughout. It's kind of, if you, if you need it, you just space it out and, and use it appropriately. And then the other thing which is always a bugbear with sports nutrition, but especially with caffeinated sports nutrition, is taste. And we worked insanely hard to get the taste as neutral as possible. So I actually tested some of our caffeine gels in the race on Saturday, which I've used a lot of them in training, but this was the first time using them in anger. And I almost, because I was racing and running and I couldn't tell the difference between the caffeine gel, I had to look at the packet to assure myself I was taking one with caffeine in. And I'm really happy about that because the amount of people that complain about the taste. So many caffeine gels go down the route of cola flavor or coffee flavor or something like that, or chocolate, which always, you know, is very polarizing. Some people love them, a lot of people hate them. We just kept it super neutral and, and so, yeah, it says very clearly massive letters on the front and a big sort of bronze stripe that's got 100 milligrams of caffeine in it. So there's ambiguity there. But when you taste it, hopefully it tastes just like a normal regular energy gel.

I had a set of hyper caffeinated gels and I just had to stop having them because it was just a battle to get through it. My face would be squirming and it was like, you said that cola flavor and you just, you're forcing it down because you know it's what you want, but it's just so hard. It's like drinking a complete sour drink on the, on the fluid spectrum. I just wanted to clarify something in terms of calculating your fluid loss. So in that example you gave of bit little a before where you said, let's say you lost two liters of fluid by weighing yourself approximately over two hours. So one liter loss of fluid per hour. Two questions on this one is what are the levels of in terms of the scale of what's low and what's kind of up at the higher end of loss per hour. And then are you aiming to replace all of that per hour? So if you're losing one liter an hour, you're aiming to replace a liter with fluid or is it half or what is it?

Yeah. So in terms of the range of fluid loss, it's. The range is pretty big. A low sweat rate for a small person who has a naturally low sweat rate who's exercising in cool conditions can be really low, like in a couple of hundred milliliters an hour. So that's kind of where there is almost, and arguably in certain conditions at certain intensities, you could almost be close to zero fluid loss per hour. It'd never truly be zero. But we can all, we all know that if we go for an easy jog on a really cold day wearing not a lot of layers, you can, you will not be wet when you finish, so your fluid loss will be really low. The more interesting bit is if you go to the upper end. And we've seen athletes with fluid losses in excess of 3.5 liters per hour, you know, but they, they tend to be bigger guys in hot conditions with who are also very fit so they can keep a very high metabolic rate, produce a lot of heat and therefore or sweat a lot. The biggest sweat losses we've seen actually have been in sports like NBA basketball, professional tennis players. So high intensity sports played in hot conditions, intermittent. So you generate a lot of body heat and keep your heat up really high. We have seen triathletes with super high sweat rates. A few, couple of guys probably more than three liters an hour. But that's relatively rare because triathletes tend to be a smaller stature in general. It's obviously not, not necessarily the case for age groupers, but certainly at the elite end you don't find a lot of guys topping 85 kilos or whatever. You know, it's, it's sort of smaller people. I would say if you're an average sweat rate for someone exercising in warm moderate conditions is going to be in the ballpark of a liter an hour, you know, and then anything above 1.5 to 2 liters is pretty high. And certainly if you're heading for two and a half liters, you are a, a serious sweater. But, but it depends a lot on that, the exercise intensity and the environmental conditions. So even though I've said three, three and a half liters an hour is there, that's very rare. Like we don't see many people at all go beyond about 2.5 liters an hour routinely, especially when you're doing endurance stuff. Because although the intensity can be reasonably high, it's not as high as when you're doing an intermittent and sport like basketball or something like that when you are absolutely sprinting flat out and causing huge metabolic rates in terms of how much you need. Yeah. And how much you need to replace. That's like. That is the killer question. It's also the most difficult to answer. But almost categorically you can say you don't need to replace 100% because every study that's looked at Ironman finishes and marathon finishes has shown that the faster people finish with a. A few percent lighter than they started and that that window is usually between about 2 and 5%, something like that. You know, body weight loss at the end of a race. It. There appears to be a bit of inter. Individual variability. And I also think it depends a lot on how well fueled and hydrated you are when you start. Because often we start race day a bit heavier than we do on a regular day because you've glycogen loaded and you've, you've preloaded with fluid and sodium. So you are. I used to start an Ironman race a kilo or two heavier than I was the rest of the week, which is a good thing because you've got a lot more substrate to use and a lot more fluid on board at that point. But let's say, you know, between 2 and 5% body weight loss by the end is acceptable, then the amount that you need to replace is therefore probably, you know, in the 50 to 70% range of losses. But it gets higher as the race gets longer because obviously you, the difference between those two numbers increases over the duration of time. And that's where the bit of trial and error comes in. It's like, okay, well how much. When do I start to feel basically like my performance is dropping off or when is my recovery seriously impaired? Is it when I get to 4% body weight loss or 6% body weight loss or 2% body weight loss? That's what you'll discover by a bit of trial and error. And there's no hard and fast rule for that, unfortunately.

Yeah. And so that brings us to the, the method of trying to figure out your sodium loss is the only way to do that, a sweat test? The only really accurate way.

That's the, that's, that is the accurate way. So you get your sweat composition Analyzed and there's numerous ways of doing that. We obviously have our technology that's based in different places around the world where you can book a test and that's done at rest. Some people offer exercise based testing for sweat sodium analysis, but ultimately that's always going to give you the most accurate number. What we do have on our website as well are various tools, including the online version of the sweat test, where you can answer some questions and it gives you a kind of rating as to whether you're likely to be low, moderate, high or very high in terms of salt loss. And certainly that we've refined that algorithm over the years. And whilst any questionnaire based algorithm is only as good as the inputs, we feel like it gives a very decent recommendation to you as to whether your trial and error should start, excuse me, in the lower end of the spectrum or the middle or the higher, you know, it's kind of getting you in the right zone.

You give some really good key indicators as to the type of factors that might lead to someone being a really high sodium loss person. The key ones you already mentioned were lots of salt on the clothing. You see some people with, with crazy amounts of white stains and clothing compared to others. What are some other key factors people can look out for that might indicate that they are a high sodium loss person compared to another athlete?

I would say if you sweat and it goes in your eyes and it really stings, that can often be a solid indicator. Or if you get a little cut or something like that and salt, the salt in the sweat really stings and cuts and things that can be an indicator. If you generally just kind of feel like crap in hot races and suffer things like episodes of low blood pressure and feeling lethargic. I always used to feel in the summer when I was training really, really hard, if I lay on the sofa for a while, like between, between training sessions, I would stand up and feel really dizzy and lightheaded because obviously low, low blood volume, low blood pressure, you're losing a lot of salt, that, that brings your blood pressure down. So if you, if you suffer frequent episodes of low blood pressure that can around exercise, that can be an indicator. If you crave salt after workouts or if you're someone who likes to salt your food, then your body's pretty well attuned to being low on sodium. So if you, if you crave the taste of salt at the end of training sessions or meals that you have after, after training. There was a famous study done where they gave athletes who'd exercised For a while, different bowls and of soup and relate. They had to rate which was the tastiest bowl of soup. And they found that essentially it was the same soup but they added more salt to it for some, you know, in some cases. And people who'd exercise for longer and lost more salt prefer the saltier soup. So your body sort of is pretty good at knowing. So any oral and cramping as well, which, you know, we haven't touched on too much, but it's like a controversial topic. But whatever the science, I'm not one to ignore the science. There is, but the science is very polarizing in that area of debate. And we've seen a lot of anecdotal evidence around the fact that people who lose a lot of sodium quite often suffer with a higher incidence of muscle cramps that then goes away or gets better if they ingest more sodium. So it's kind of one of those things when, where if you are suspect that you're losing a lot of salt and you're someone who cramps, it's certainly worth trying taking more in because it's a pretty safe and cheap way of seeing if you can solve that problem.

What's the risk of having too much salt? You touched on too much carbs, you get GI problems, digestive problems, too much water, it could be hyponatremic, which is a disaster. Too much salt, what's the key indicator of what's going to happen there?

You can, you can definitely give yourself GI issues with too much salt. You know, if you ingest too much, you'll feel quite. You can feel quite sick and also very, very thirsty because obviously it's doing the opposite of hyponatremia. It's pumping up your. You're becoming hypernatremic. So your salt levels are going up and, and you can retain fluid. So if you do it chronically, you can find that you. You do retain additional fluid. So that's where the caveat around, you know, not. Not being super aggressive. Sodium supplementation does need to be aggressive for some people, but it's aggressive because their losses are aggressive. And if you're not someone who loses a lot, then you only want to take in an appropriate amount. So it's a case of feeling it out and balancing it. That that pro athlete I mentioned before was feeling excessively thirsty in races. Even though she was drinking quite a lot, she was taking in tons and tons of salt. And what we ended up doing was just dialing back the salt concentration of the drinks a bit. And that seemed to balance it out. So, you know, the longer term implication of excessive sodium intake is hotly debated in medicine, but it's linked to high blood pressure. Clearly whether. But if you're an athlete, your fluid and salt turnover is likely a lot higher than the average person. So your daily sodium requirements is going to be up. So really it's probably the acute problems of feeling thirsty and feeling sick in races that are more likely to bug you than anything else.

Just on that, I know we haven't talked a great deal about the cramping and something that's, it's really ruined a lot of the races that I've been in over the journey and Jordan seems to have inherited my cramping issues as well. Something that I get asked a bit and it happens to me as well is the involuntary muscle spasm in the leg. Is that, is that an indicator?

I would say, I would say it is based on the fact that. So for example, when I did this race on Saturday, this is common occurrence for me. I was just feeling, after two and a half hours, I hadn't really taken any sodium in, but I say that I'd taken a little bit in some of the drinks that we had on the course, but it wasn't a lot. I drank a very small amount and I was getting nips of muscle cramp in my quads and in my carbs on the last run. And then even though I had quite a lot of salt after the race that evening, I'm sat in a chair and I can feel my calves rippling a little bit and feeling a bit bumpy and that sort of thing. That's very, very common. And the naysayers would argue that's, that's to do with exertion in the race. And they could have a point in terms of fatigue and that sort of thing. But it very, it very, very commonly happens to me when I'm, when I have taken it into fish electrolytes or when I come to Australia and spend the first two or three days in extreme heat and I'm not used to it. I can definitely like, I'll get cramp on an airplane or get cramped sitting in a. Sitting at the dinner table or something because I've got. And it starts with those kind of little. You can just feel the muscles getting tight and tense and you can feel a few ripples and then bang, it goes into a cramp. And I think it's all, I think it's all related and it tends to calm down for me when I acclimatize to a new environment. And if I make sure that I'm staying on top of drinking electrolyte drinks or putting salt in my food rather than just drinking plain water.

Andy, there's a few topics we want to ask on, but we might have to get you back on and, and go into them even more. Cramping is a big one. You touched on fat adaptation, which I know you have some key thoughts on and you've written some great stuff on your website about it which people can go read. Also, next time you come on, we'd like to touch on training in cool environments when you're racing in hot environments. That's a whole topic of itself. But yeah, we'd like to thank you so much for coming on. We'll finish up the podcast here. Is there any message you want to get across to finish off to athletes out there, to the audience about hydration? What's you're really passionate about this. You founded such a great company. What do you want athletes to know about this and understand?

I think the biggest message to take away is that there's no one size fits all answer for fueling and particularly for hydration. And there are a lot of people out there that get a lot of air time with, with very strong, definitive messages around it. I heard a very, very well known fellow Brit, actually a very well known triathlete, triathlon coach, recently on another podcast categorically rubbishing the idea of sweat testing and taking in sodium during long hot races and stuff. And that's probably based a lot on personal experience of, you know, the n of one individual who has done really well without needing to supplement. I'm at the other end of the spectrum and I was certainly guilty at one point of being the guy who was saying that everyone should be taking tons of salt. And my position has come back towards the middle a little bit on the basis that I recognize that there are a lot of people out there like me who need a lot. And there are also probably an equal number of people who don't need a lot. And then, and then a whole bunch of people fill in the gap in between. This is a bell shaped curve. And what I would say is that try to resist the temptation to get sucked into these kind of polarizing ends of arguments. We still get emails to, as we get, we get a ton of emails and people contacting us saying how brilliant it's been that they've followed our advice and how much their cramping's gone away or how much their performance has improved and we get one or two who email us and say I've heard so and so saying that this is an absolute waste of time. What do you think about that? And I've kind of got bored of reply to those people because I'm like, well this is a very individual topic and what you need to do as an athlete is figure out what works for you. Precision, fuel and hydration are here. We're here as a resource with knowledge hub on our website with 20 minute video calls with sweat testing, with products that you can use in order to kind of help you on that journey to figuring out what works for you. Like I say, we've got the, we've hopefully got some of the know how. We've got some of the tools and products that then allow you to build a strategy and test it. We've got digital tools now which help you to plan and work out what you might need and just be prepared to go on a bit of a journey of self discovery around figuring out what works for you. Don't get too caught up in these polarizing arguments and that's how you'll actually move forward and be successful rather than trying to pick a side or picking a picking a side in the fight talk. It being very controversial in what you say is a great way of getting followers and listeners and likes and people who you know. It's a great tactic for getting people to click on what you do. But actually the more boring, sort of moderate, it depends approach is actually what gets there for most people in the end. So that's the line we're trying to take.

That's a great way to finish. And I am a big fan if you couldn't tell already. Absolutely love what you're doing, love everything about your company and super impressed with your website. I encourage all the listeners to go check it out. It's just a wealth of knowledge and I just love how clearly you're laying out different concepts, how well you're presenting the arguments. And while they might be moderate arguments, they're definitely entertaining and worth reading because it's questions that as athletes we're all asking ourselves. And I'm just another person who has had a very good anecdotal experience with your product so far for someone who as we mentioned, suffered really bad from cramps. And I think I'm probably going to be in a minority case of how easy it was for me to switch, but I just went straight to the Ph 1500 after doing a few of your online sweat test calculators. I'm A big sweater. I have every single, almost every single one of those salt factors you talked about. I started taking the Ph 1500 which is the highest sodium kind of tablet you can have in your drink and I have not had cramp since. So that I know that's just anecdotal evidence and that wouldn't happen to everyone. Like you said, it's probably going to be, could be a case of more trial and error and I feel very lucky that that seems to have solved it almost immediately. But because of that, yeah, I'm a big fan and really love your work.

That's great, great to hear that. It'd be fascinating to get you and your dad sweat tested when we can to see because in my family it certainly runs. You know, I lose a lot of sight, my sweat, my brother does, my dad does. We all tend to suffer with cramps and things. So it will be super interesting to see if that is a factor for you guys. So we should, you should definitely get that sorted out sooner rather than later.

Andy, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Go check out Precision hydration their website, precisionhydration.com is that correct?

It's actually, that will work. It's actually Precision fuel these days.

Great.

Yeah, that's it for this episode.

Thank you very much for listening. We really hope you enjoyed it. And if you would like to test any of the Precision Hydration products, you can go to their website precisionfuelandhydration.com and use the code TRIVELO15 to get 15 off your first order of electrolytes and fuel fuel at the checkout. And when you go to their website like we spoke about, you can have a, have a go at their quick carb calculator to work out how many carbs you need for your race. There's a free online sweat test to see what kind of sweater you are and you can also book a free 20 minute hydration and fueling strategy video consultation with a member of their team which is so valuable because you can ask them any personal questions you like about using their products. So if you go to their website, use the code TRAVELLER15 to get 15% off your first order. That's it for this episode. We'll see you next time.